Markdown to PDF
Markdown to PDF, typeset like a book
bukpress converts a Markdown file into a paginated A4 PDF with your own typefaces, covers and colours embedded in the file. Unlike a print-to-PDF from the browser or a one-click converter, it gives you real page breaks, repeating table headers, footer page numbers and a live preview that paginates exactly like the export.
How to convert
Markdown to PDF in three steps
Paste or drop in your Markdown
Open a new project and paste the text, or drag in the .md file you already have. It autosaves, and the page on the right repaginates while you type.
Set the type, paper and margins
Choose title, subtitle and body typefaces with their sizes and colours, pick the paper, set margins in points, and turn page numbers on or off. Save it as a Brand Kit and the next book starts here.
Export the PDF
The render runs server-side on the same engine the preview mirrors, so the A4 pages, page breaks, embedded fonts and — if you turned them on — the footer page numbers come out exactly as you watched them.
What comes out the other side
The export is a print file, not a screenshot of a web page. Every PDF bukpress renders is A4 with margins measured in points, carries your typefaces embedded so it opens correctly on a machine that has never had them installed, numbers its pages in the footer, and puts your front and back cover artwork on the first and last pages.
There is no watermark on any plan, including the free one, and you keep every right to what you export — including selling it.
The Markdown it understands
Everything you would expect, plus three things most converters leave you to fake with raw HTML:
| You write | You get |
|---|---|
# / ## / ### | Headings, styled from your title and body type settings and used as the document's structure in both exports. |
**bold** / *italic* | Bold and italic, in the real weights of whichever family you picked — not a synthesised slant. |
- item / 1. item | Bulleted and numbered lists, indented to the same measure as the body text. |
| a | b | | Tables. If one runs past the bottom of a page, the header row repeats on the next page instead of orphaning the data. |
```code``` | Fenced code blocks, set in a monospace face and kept whole rather than broken mid-block where it can be avoided. |
 | Images, placed in the flow and held on the page they belong to. |
--- on its own line | A hard page break. This is the one every other Markdown-to-PDF tool makes you fake with raw HTML or CSS. |
---- on its own line | A printed divider — the small ornamental rule between scenes or sections. |
A single Enter | A real line break, the way you meant it. Standard Markdown swallows single newlines; for poetry, addresses and verse that is the wrong answer. |
Why not just print to PDF from a browser?
Because a browser paginates a web page, not a book. Printing a rendered Markdown preview gives you whatever the page happened to look like at that width: headers and footers from the browser, page breaks wherever the text ran out, no control over margins in real units, no embedded typefaces, no covers, and a table that silently loses its header row halfway down. Command-line toolchains — Pandoc with LaTeX, say — do produce proper books, but you are configuring a typesetting system before you can see a page.
bukpress is the middle: the output quality of a real typesetting engine, with the design set from a handful of controls and shown to you as pages while you write.
- Separate title, subtitle and body typefaces, each with its own size and colour
- Eight bundled paper textures — Ink, Cream, Midnight, Paper — or your own full-bleed image
- Margins in points, and line height
- Page numbers in the footer, on or off
- Front and back cover artwork
See one before you sign up
The Quiet Hour is eight A4 pages written as a single Markdown file and exported straight out of bukpress with nothing touched afterwards. Open it and check the page breaks, the table set as a real table, the embedded type and the margins.
Your draft is already a book.
It just hasn't been set yet. Paste it into bukpress and export the finished file today.
Start free — no card required